


Instant Karma

by snicholas



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Astrology, Bisexuality, Brief Instances Of, Child Abuse, Dark, Domestic Violence, Drug Addiction, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Friendship/Love, Graphic Description, Homoeroticism, John Lennon's Death, Male Bonding, Obsession, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Questioning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 15:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20048143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snicholas/pseuds/snicholas
Summary: Its December 10th, 1980, and John Lennon wakes up to discover that Paul McCartney, ex-partner and lifelong best friend, has been murdered. John quickly finds his wife and son have left him abruptly, the world is convinced of a vicious rivalry between him and his deceased best friend, and he still has tickets to England, bought for a trip his old friends and relatives expect him to follow through on.Yoko tells him to "survive this alone." But in the face of criticism from the media, the brutality of the past and the truth of his relationship with Paul, will John be able to?Published simultaneously on Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/194460205-instant-karmaFind me on Tumblr @knowheresam! https://knowheresam.tumblr.com/





	1. Instant Karma

John had a feeling he was going to die that night. In fact, it had crept up on him all year, but it wasn't until the beginning of December that his eyes began to fly open in the mornings, struck by a thought. "It could be today," he'd realize.

December 8th was the worst. Perhaps it had just been the exhaustion of a day spent out on business. He'd arrived home with Yoko late at night, and followed out of the car and into the shadowed alcove of the Dakota Building. As she'd started up the stairs towards the apartments, he'd paused to glance over either shoulder. A glamorous iron lamp above the phone-box poured golden light over the sidewalk, empty. The street was black and vacant, all but for the limousine they'd just arrived in, still parked. In that moment, John had vividly expected the arrival of a cloaked figure, the flash or a bullet or a knife in his back. 

Nothing had happened. With a crease above his auburn brow, he'd followed Yoko upstairs and arrived safely home.

In fact, it had crept up on him all year. There was a sense of foreboding that approached with one's fortieth birthday, a sometimes brutal awareness of the impermanence of everything that hovered on the year's horizon. Yet it wasn't until John's fortieth birthday had passed and a busy December had begun that John began to see death in every shadowy corner.

It had been a heightened awareness of fans who looked at him funny, without their typical moronic stammering, of long coats that stood and watched him from across the street. John would be sent back to the 60s, when a few choice words about Christianity had spilled from his lips and the Beatles had had the K.K.K. writing them death-threats, banging on their hotel room doors and shooting firecrackers at them onstage. Of course, he and the Beatles had faced death threats and dangerous looks ever since they'd made it big, and it hadn't been long after they'd first arrived in America that John had started to fear assassination.

Moving to New York City hadn't helped matters.

The metropolis had been a thrill, at first, with so much food, vulgar clubbing and artistic enlightenment sprawled out on his doorstep. He'd wanted to swan around with Yoko to the all the galleries she'd told him about, to freely roam the streets, grimy as they were, side by side, like he had as a teenager in Liverpool. But he and Yoko would land on the sidewalk outside the Dakota, cross the street to Central Park, and people would start to follow them. Often they'd ask to take photograph, get an autograph or just chat with them a minute, but sometimes they'd just trail half-a-block behind them in utter silence. 

Of course, John and Yoko had welcomed the attention on their quaint walks through the park. If John ever tired of the baseless photographers who flocked to make their fortunes on his granny glasses and her black frizz, Yoko would remind him, "It's only every now and then." To catch a glimpse of their domestic life, Yoko would explain, would let the public see that they were happy, whether or not John was playing the game of music and sponsorship. "It shows them we're just living our lives," Yoko would say.

John would feel a cozy, closed-windowed bedroom in his heart and agree with her. But in the years that he'd once in a blue moon go on a walk alone, sometimes with little Sean tucked in a stroller, sometimes with an assistant at his side, he couldn't help his immense irritation with the questions perfect strangers would flock to ask him. There was little he could do--even deep into the 70s, when rockers like Van Halen, Queen and Pink Floyd had taken over the airwaves alongside soft-pop and disco, nostalgic coots and scrappy youths who'd just bought their first Beatles record would tiptoe up and ask, "Will the Beatles ever get back together?"

"I don't know," John would say, when he was being honest. Sometimes, he'd just smile and walk away. But on particularly bitter days, when a song from the past had lodged inside his head, he'd bare his teeth and tell them, "Never." 

If they blanched and quickly excused themselves, good. It gave him a chance to bound back across the street.

He'd duck inside the four walls of his bedroom and feel beautifully safe. He'd turn on the TV to fill the hollows in his chest with warm static, lean back on the queen-sized bed he'd have to himself for the day, and turn on the radio on the nightstand to get cheap thrills off of the big-haired rockers, the disco and the amateurish hits of Dylan and Jagger. He knew he could've done any of it better, if he'd wanted to, and the thought pleased him.

All would be well until one of Paul's songs came on the radio.

He'd turn his face against the pillow and watch as the radio, with round speakers like cheeks, chortled bursts of electric pop-rock that were just offbeat enough for John to recognize as Paul's music. An infuriatingly catchy McCartney melody would drift between his ears and latch on to his long-term memory, accompanied by absurd lyrics that made John's fingers itch for pen and paper. "'Plays a simple song upon his flute, toot toot.' Silly boy," John would say, although his hands would be too heavy to lift, his lungs trapped beneath the weight of an invisible glacier. Against the patchy white ceiling, he'd watch Paul throw back his head and holler for attention in an empty stadium.

Paul's best songs were the most excruciating. When "Band on the Run" had first thumped into his ears, he'd clenched his fingers in his hair, entertained a fantasy of his ex-bandmate's pretty face beneath an array of medieval weapons, and then had ripped the needle off the record back to the beginning of the track. And at the dawn of 1980, when John had first heard "Coming Up," a song off of Paul's electronic, bluntly experimental solo album, he'd felt his way through the dark to find Yoko's white piano and barely managed to tape a new tune before he forgot it.

The next time he'd heard "Coming Up," he'd shut off the radio and listened to the phantoms of competition thrum inside his arms.

Yoko's advice could not have come sooner. "Mercury is in retrograde. There's bad luck this month. You should take a trip," she'd told him from the threshold of her small eggshell-white office downstairs. It had used to be their shared office, with a small upright piano against the wall, but after years of disuse Yoko had claimed it as a quiet place to make phone calls and conduct her business, trading prize cows and communicating with Apple. Her desktop had been swarmed with incomplete paperwork and her hair had been smoothed in an immaculate bun, a sleek pantsuit framing her delicate body. "Sam says it's best that you travel south-west, a long way away."

"Sam who," John had asked.

"Sam Green," she'd said. Sam Green was a friendly man, a confidante of theirs as well as an expert taro reader they'd often consulted. The other Sam, John preferred not to think about.

With a sigh, John rubbed the coarse stubble on his jaw and considered her advice. He knew very well not to ignore her premonitions, and besides, he never minded a vacation, granted there was someone to organize it for him. But he'd hate to leave Sean alone with the house staff and his nanny Helen for so long an interval. Helen was the auntie of Fred Seaman, an attentive, intelligent young man awaiting his first year of journalism school. Like her nephew, Helen was personable, and as she worked in the kitchen would happily answer hour-long strings of questions from five-year-old Sean about the nature of anything. But she wasn't his mother. 

"I could sail to Bermuda," John said. "I've been dying to go sailing. Then I could have Fred fly over with Sean and spend some time on the beaches there." The idea thrilled him the longer he dwelled on it: clear tropical waves, rich gold sand, and peace.

"That sounds great," Yoko said, leaned against the doorway, her eyes glazed and averted to some distant corner of the room as she pondered some art project, probably one of her impassioned expressions of young love in scattered black ink or guttural recordings. 

Watching her, disappointment had stung like an ancient scar inside John's stomach. "Will you go with us?" He asked.

"Too much to do," she said. "I'll visit."

Once Yoko had found him an excursion to join upon and he'd hassled an easily-convinced Fred into coming to Bermuda with Sean, John departed  
Once Yoko had found him an excursion to join upon and he'd hassled an easily-convinced Fred into coming to Bermuda with Sean, John departed. It had been the middle of June, and summer heat flooded the Rhode Island docks and waded up from the floor of sloop Megan Jay into John's sandals. He'd stood and watched with interest as a crewman hoisted the sail into the morning haze of the sky, and he'd half-expected the clouds make way for the sharp fabric. 

"I don't suppose you'll let me hoist the anchor?" John had asked, and smiled through his sunglasses at the young man as he tied the galliard. The meekest of a group of four or five dark-haired cousins, the Conelys, who served as the ship's crew, the boy froze and stared tongue-tied at John.

"I'm afraid you're not allowed," answered Hank with an apologetic smile. He was a sun-kissed man about John's age who served as the boat's captain, and thankfully hadn't treated John with the tongue-tied deference as the rest of the crew. "In sailor years you're still a cabin boy. That's just how it works."

"I'll be the cook, then," John had said, biting back irritation at the flash of surprise on Hank's face, and the way the rest of the crew turned to study him with amusement. "Just treat me as part of the crew. And who knows, if I don't burn the girl down, maybe you'll let me drive her later, eh, Hank?" 

At this, Hank had winked. "We'll see," he said. 

With a burst of excitement, John had retreated into the boat's small cabin to take another look at the black kerosene stove installed in the corner. He soon found out it was gimbaled, and the trays inside stayed level with each waver of the boat, and he was thrilled at this discovery. 

John had always wanted to be a sailor. The prospect of a life at sea, in the middle of nowhere, had fascinated him since he was a young child, listening to his mother Julia's weary story of his father's stint in the Merchant Navy. His father, Alf, had been away at sea throughout the second World War when he'd faced a drinking arrest, then vanished. Julia had only found he was gone when she'd stopped receiving cheques from the Merchant Navy, her and and an infant John's sole source of income at the time.

As John had understood it at the time, Alf was nothing but a coward who'd jumped ship at the first sign of warfare. John liked to think that he would've sailed straight into the maw of the elements and never one think to flee. And as a teenager, he'd stand above the Liverpool docks as the boats pulled in, and sailors, their skin summers darker than his own gray face, had emerged with shipments from America. Some of the crates would be packed with plastic-wrapped records from the world's greatest rock n' rollers; the yellers, doo-woppers, guitarists and pianists of the United States.

John had felt sick with embarrassment to stand there and watch from the rails because the sailors had all been gay, the scum of Liverpool. But once or twice, he'd wondered what would happen if he were to walk up and ask for a job on-board. 

It was forty-eight hours into Megan Jay's voyage that Hank had showed John how to steer the boat. John hadn't done so much as drive a car in recent years, and it took about an hour to adapt to the weight of the wheel in his hands and his eyes on the horizon. Once he had, though, Hank retreated heavy-eyed into the cabin to catch up on his sleep. John had already served the crew an unsettling lunch of over-easy eggs and flimsy sliced bread, one of the few takeaways from his career as a househusband, and the crew were all a bit woozy-eyed.

That's when the storm hit. The sky had vanished into a gray void, and tropical waves had started to throttle the boat, crashing against the deck in blades of saltwater until they'd began to stumble with the force of it. Through his waterlogged glasses, John watched the horizon arch and flare like a viscous flag, and he'd frozen, fearful of moving in case he'd lose his course. He'd heard the crew begin to moan and retch behind him, and knew he was finished. 

"Hank," he'd called feebly, because he'd known Hank wouldn't hear him over the storm, Part of him was ready to scream for the captain and retreat into the cabin until it was over, the storm finished, the boat overturned and buried underwater. Another part of him was curious to see where this would go—a pop-star with no sailing experience fighting his way through a tropical storm, three days off the coast of Bermuda—and that was the part of him that won.

Another massive wave slapped him in the face. The boat lurched downwards and dragged John along with it in a lethal spring of momentum, and his neck began to ache from the force of it. But it was like being onstage—once you were on, you couldn't get off. He locked his feet against the slippery floor, clutched the wheel and stared into the gray oblivion he was trapped within. "Oh God," John cackled at the insanity of it all. "There are worse ways to die than this." And when the boat rode over a great swell of the sea, he laughed again through the water in his mouth. "That's right—fuck you," he yelled as he crashed back down, and began to sing: "Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies, farewell an 'adieu you ladies of Spain!"

When at last the storm clouds had parted, the sea returned to an innocent blue serenity, the sun had tingled against John's doused skin. He'd brimmed with life—he beamed with it. He hadn't felt so alive in years, not since he was a young man, maybe twenty or twenty-one years old. Undiluted, lecherous rock n' roll had spilled from his lips to appreciative cheers, a nightly audience of rockers and students his age. They'd known the Beatles by their first names, and the Beatles had known them, too.

"This next song's a Lennon-McCartney original," John would say once or twice a night in the sweltering Cavern club, and the amiable crowd would dim to a thoughtful quiet as the band blazed with talent. Him, George and Paul. 

Paul had looked up across the stage at John and grinned boyishly, his eyes like pools of joy, so happy to get to sing something they'd written themselves, together. 

John awoke to find his fingers bound in miles of sweat-soaked medical tape, declawed as he scraped and tore at unmoved, stale carpet  
John awoke to find his fingers bound in miles of sweat-soaked medical tape, declawed as he scraped and tore at unmoved, stale carpet. He blinked through bleary, barren eyes, and his heart raced dangerously as if he'd been jerked out of reality and slammed into a nightmare. 

His arms were braced against the floor. Belatedly, he recognized it as his bedroom floor, and the blood beneath his skin chilled quickly as if falling from a beauteous high. Gnarled, sweat-soaked hair dangled in his face, his spine ached from his lower back to the hook of his neck, and he sweltered beneath the layers of his bedclothes. He felt like he'd been hunched there for hours, his useless nails against the carpet. In the silence of the apartment, his breaths were heavy and exhausted as if at the end of hysterics.

Something terrible had happened, he realized easily. And he was very reluctant to find out what it was. 

Painfully, he sat up. His eyelids stung with a lack of closure, and he blinked through the impassioned morning light as it flooded the room with reality. He looked down at his hands, still wrapped in that well-worn tape—who had restrained him?

"Yoko?" John called. With the balls of his hands and his cracking feet, he stumbled upright, and was struck with dizziness. As he fought there for his bearings, a fragment of a memory slipped into his cotton-stuffed head. 

The memory felt a week-old, numb. He'd rifled through a medicine cabinet, the one in the apartment's north-end bathroom, to furiously crack open a bottle of pills and bury his face into it, swallow it all at one into every pore of his body. Hands had wrenched him away by his arms. Distantly, Sean sobbed.

Urgency fluttered in John's chest, and he squared his jaw. He couldn't hear a thing in the echo-chamber of their apartment, no hushed conversation of Yoko's nor Sean's ritualistic viewing of Sesame Street to be heard. "Yoko," he called louder, and righted himself through his myopia enough to spot the bedroom door. He stepped towards the wavering lines on the wall.

A door squealed open behind him. "John," came the awestruck voice of a man. Deliriously, John thought it must've been a Beatles fan who'd broken in somehow, in some yellow hotel in 1964, and he wheeled around to see who it was. 

The door to the master bathroom was ajar, and steam floated out where a fellow stood with a towel knotted around his waist, slightly flabby. His mouth was slack and he stared as if John was an infant who'd just walked for the first time. 

It was just Fred.

John squeezed his eyes shut, feeling suddenly adrift as in a harmless, ludicrous dream. "I told you not to use Mother's bathtub on the job again," he told Fred in a voice that cracked and ached from overuse. "In fact, you shouldn't use the tub at all, 'cause it's not your fuckin' tub."

"John, you've—" His assistant spoke in starts, and began to approach with his hands raised like a dogcatcher afraid of being bitten. "How are you feeling, John? Are you feeling better?"

John had never seen Fred so tentative. "I'd feel a lot better if I knew what was going on," he said pointedly, and Fred's mouth shut quickly, his skin ashen from his face to his bare toes. At this, John decided he really didn't want to know what was going on, not yet, and fiddled glumly with his bound fingers. "I don't suppose you did this?"

Fred darted forwards quickly to remove the tape, and John lifted his hands dutifully. "I'm sorry, we had to do it," Fred explained. "You weren't in your right mind."

John recalled the pills. It would've been more effective, he thought, if he'd reached for a bag of heroin instead, but he knew for certain he'd kicked his addiction for long enough now that--but, no, he couldn't dwell on that, not now. He winced as the tape pulled free, lined with a pillow of gauze and yet clinging to places to the dark hairs on his fingers. When it was done, he swiped the sweat-damp skin of his fingers across his bathrobe. "So, now you've seen one of my explosions," he jibed, and feigned a smile at Fred's creased, pondering expression. "I'm surprised you didn't send me to a psych ward."

"No," his assistant replied, and he paused to find the right words. "We couldn't have stomached it, to do that. And Yoko knew you'd come out of it."

The thought of Yoko's confidence warmed John just slightly through the clouds of this alien atmosphere he'd awoken in, but it wasn't enough. Quickly, this began a black swell of fear in John's chest. Usually, one of Yoko's reassurances was all he needed to feel secure in the most unfamiliar of situations. He'd learned shortly after he began seeing her that when she looked to the stars for hints, she would mutter an answer, and, unfailingly, she would be right. But now, his confidence had dwindled to an inexplicable emptiness. 

"So, where has she gone?" He questioned firmly, his eyes a slender line as he searched past Fred's form as if to find them sidled against the mahogany dresser, or underneath the window frame. 

Fred swallowed audibly. "She's left with Sean," he said, and the words fell into John like a boiling fluid. "But listen, John, there's something else--"

"Bullshit," John said, and rounded on the bedroom door. He fumbled the knob between his wrists and breezed into the fresh air of the hallway when it opened, set on the kitchen and the telephone inside. "She can't just take off to fuck-knows-where when God-knows-what has happened and—"

The edge of the glass coffee table caught his eye, and he stopped. The table sat unassumingly on the sitting room rug, but it was covered in newspapers, an almost absurd excess of them, and the TV loomed a muted black in front of it. John approached the table and peered down. 

His eyes danced over a morbid arrangement, engorged fonts of white and black splayed over a dark head of hair and a face John knew better than his own. The portraits came in variants, some with crows-feet around glamorously hooded eyes, others with the delicate chin and round lips of a youth, and yet more with cheeks that were redder, heavier and so hidden in facial hair that even John struggled to recognize him. Still, they were all the same face—that of Paul McCartney's. 

In one of the photos, there was no face, just the arch of a head and feet beneath a white blanket. "MACCA DEAD AFTER KNIFE ATTACK," screamed the headline. And his eyes found more of them: "PAUL MCCARTNEY'S MURDER: 'THE ACT OF A MADMAN,' DECLARE POLICE,'" read another. The rest of the words were too small and too numerous for John to read.

"Here," came a whisper beside him. He glanced up to see his wireframe glasses, cleaned and polished, between his assistant's fingers. John slid the glasses onto his nose and glanced back at the newspaper.

THE DAILY MIRROR 

DECEMBER 10th, 1980

THE MAN WHO KILLED PAUL MCCARTNEY: "A MADMAN," POLICE DECLARE

Yesterday morning at George Martin's AIR Studios, located in the suburbs of Hampstead, London, PAUL MCCARTNEY (aged 38) was brutally stabbed to death by DAVID E. ELISCH (aged 31), who turned himself in to police upon their arrival on the scene. In a press conference this morning officials declared that killer Elisch is "very mentally disturbed" and that his "motives were incoherent." Additionally, they described Elisch's obsession with McCartney which was later confirmed by his parents, ALFRED and LUCILLE ELISCH.

"'He called himself 'Paul's biggest fan,' and had carried a copy of McCartney's album 'RAM' which he asked McCartney to sign," said OFFICER LOUIS GIBBONS, who was responsible for Elisch's arrest. McCartney had happily approached Elisch and began to chat with him as he signed the album's back cover. "And in the next moment, Elisch expressed [to Gibbons] his anger at McCartney for breaking up the Beatles

John tore his eyes away from the paper to search Fred's face instead. The red, raw skin under his eyes and the overgrowth of his flaxen beard were all in sharp relief through John's prescriptions, as was the pity opaque in Fred's eyes. John's stomach lurch.

"But this is ridiculous," John said. A sharp laugh escaped his lips. "Who the hell gets murdered in Hampstead? And what's he thinking, showing up there alone?" He thought of Paul's eager gait, the way he couldn't force a giddy smile from his lips when he'd nailed a bass-line. John's hands flew to his hair, scraped from his receded hairline to the back of his neck, and he sighed unsteadily. "Paul isn't supposed to be dead."

"I'm sorry," said Fred. "It came over the news first thing in the morning. Yoko woke you up."

"I was asleep?" It had been only the night before he'd watched Yoko stride several steps above him in the stairwell and turned to see empty spaces and a silent nighttime street behind him. The pulse inside his chest began to transform into a lurch inside his stomach. He and Yoko had gotten home late. Paul would've just been waking up. 

"No, I would've known," John said. And in a desperate lunge for some cleverly lilting debunker in an authoritative suit, John felt through the scattered papers to find the TV remote lodged beneath them.

"Hold on, John," Fred's voice rose nervously, and his hands found John's shoulders. John shrugged him away and clicked on the TV. A burst of static passed over the screen with a large stinger that seemed to last forever as John's pulse pumped blacker and blacker blood. 

Finally, the news came on. There, trapped by a flood of microphones on the concrete doorstep of EMI, as if it was 1968 and he'd been stopped again to tell the world that no, the Beatles aren't breaking up, was George Harrison. On the TV screen, George's beard and his heavy brows were wires strewn across his face, and his eyes were deep pits of anger, a black wool scarf pulled high against his jaw. 

John felt himself sink into the couch behind the coffee table, surrounded on all sides by news. Fred stood above him, a hand clenched over his mouth.

"...A wonderful man in so many ways, and I know wherever he is now, he's in peace," George was saying in a careful mutter as his eyes flicked like balls of anger between the cameras. "And despite the frustrations of... a person like that..."

"Fuck," John burst out, his eyes aflame with tears. "Who put him on air."

"...who was at times difficult, and I'd say, quite unusual..."

John felt his knees rattle against the coffee table. "Get him on the phone, Fred. I'm going to kill him."

"John, please," Fred said carefully.

"...I loved him dearly. Yesterday, the world lost a genius, but John, Ringo and I lost a brother." Then, more dictatorial against the studio's yellow wall, George said, "For us, it's still ridiculous to talk about, and I've just seen Linda and what she told me, what she hopes for is that she and her family will be allowed to grieve privately from now on." With that, George spun around and pushed into the glass vestibule of the studio, followed by a meager babble of questions from the press.The TV anchor's voice superimposed over the video once more. Images began to pass of vigils, candles raised in the nighttime, first outside a hospital, then at the gates of a Scottish farmland.

"Following those candid remarks by George Harrison, who in the past has said much of his grievances towards his ex-bandmate, Linda McCartney reached out to the Associative Press to thank the hundreds of fans who have gathered to honor McCartney at vigils across the world and who have made a shrine of his childhood home in Liverpool..." 

On the flower-strewn lawn of the red-brick townhouse Paul had grown up in, a building John knew well but did not recognize, a throng of caps and scarves waving signs. Some of the slabs of cardboard simply read, "Why?" Others spoke words of wisdom: "Let It Be," or "Fuck David Elisch." 

"...but Mrs. McCartney also asked that the public keep their thoughts of McCartney happy and not let his death disrupt their lives, saying, I quote, 'I know that's what Paul would have wanted. He would have hated to have upset so many people.'"

John dug his nails into his palm. "Already putting words in his mouth," he scoffed, his throat hot and damp with tears, and ignored the odd look Fred shot him from the side of his eye.

"Ringo Starr has firmly refused to speak to news outlets thus far," continued the newscaster. However, yesterday afternoon, just a few hours after the announcement of Paul McCartney's death, the third remaining member of the Beatles made it perfectly clear what he thought of the death of his ex-partner and rival." 

Then, on the TV screen, John saw himself. 

"I never spoke to the press," he blurted. His mouth fell open as he struggled to recall something in the void of his memory beyond the pills in the bathroom and Sean's disjunct cries, and drew a blank. With a sound of dismay, Fred reached over to try and snatch the TV remote from his grip, but John held it out of reach, his attention glued masochistically to the screen. 

With Yoko pressed closely to his side, John burst suddenly from the front door of the Hit Factory, powder-white and his mouth a flat, almost smiling line. His face was unreadable beneath the sharp morning glare on his glasses, and he recoiled slightly at the swarm of news agents that waited on the doorstep, microphones and cameras in his face.

"Mr. Lennon, do you know about the death of Paul McCartney?" A woman's voice burst above the others.

"Yes," said John. On his arm, Yoko looked up at him in horror, her lip trapped between her teeth, and then she leaned forwards to speak into the microphone.

"We heard the news this morning, and. And all morning, we were just crying," she said. 

At this, John let out a coarse, sardonic snicker that hardly seemed his own. For an excruciating second, the correspondents and Yoko fell into a gaping silence.

An irrational flood of heat spread to John's cheeks. "I didn't mean it like..."

"I'll turn it off," said Fred.

"Don't," John said, "Please, I need to see."

"What are you doing at a recording studio?" A man said finally, the point of his chin unforgiving.

"Recording," said John. 

"Why?"

"'Cause I didn't want to stay at home," John said, then, "Excuse me," and he tried to push his way downstairs only for a pressman to stand in his way, and Yoko's small fingers latched around his arm. 

"What do you have to say about Paul's death?" Another man piped up, and pushed forwards to almost eclipse the camera. Yoko leaned towards his microphone.

"It's terrible," she said. There were firm creases of fear on her brow, and the skin beneath her eyes was sunken and pale. "Paul was really a beautiful person, in spite of everything that happened, and he and John were brothers--"

"Mr. Lennon, what do you have to say on this," interrupted the press agent.

"Well, I don't know, what do you have to say?" John asked in a lightly mocking tone. Yoko stared up at him with firm creases of fear on her brow.

"You answer first," the man replied succinctly.

"It's the same as if anyone else died," John said. As he spoke, the camera fixed and pressed in on the powder-white, globular shape of his aged face. "It's terrible, but what can you say? Some maniac was let loose with a gun again, a knife, whatever. Someone's dead."

Cameras flashed rapidly and pencils rustled over pages. "But this is Paul McCartney," someone said distantly from the back of the crowd.

"It's still the same. What can you say? He's gone and offed himself," said John.

"'Offed himself?'" Someone repeated.

"Well, it's no good to go walking around Hampstead all alone, and with that dizzy head of his. Too many daggers," he joked, and shot a featureless smile at the camera that vanished quickly into a sneer. "Now, if you don't mind, fuck off," he said, and pushed his way towards a limousine parked along the sidewalk, a firm grip on Yoko's wrist as they scrambled inside.

The newscaster's voice returned. "Since this offhand dismissal of McCartney's, on anyone's standards, an incredibly ill-timed remark on his rival's intelligence..."

John leapt to his feet and felt his knees rattle against the coffee table. "I didn't mean it," he said as a scream built inside his chest. "Why are they calling me his rival? God, I was out of it, I don't even remember... I was hysterical," he said, referring to the time he and his cousin had fallen on the bed in pangs of laughter because Uncle George had died, that time in an unlit pub that a ghastly-pale girl approached from nowhere to announce that her boyfriend, John's best friend, had had a brain aneurysm, that time a police officer knocked on the front door to inform him his mother was dead.

"Breathe," Fred's voice came distantly, and John felt his hands grip his shoulders. They were too heavy, too masculine. John's skin cried out in memory of long, slender hands, and he searched the black insides of his palms for Paul's sober form across a pub table. Throughout it all, Paul had been omnipresent, a warm, silent presence. 

"Yoko," John said, and wiped his hands furiously from beneath his glasses. "Please, tell me where she is. I need her here, Fred."

The pressure of Sam's hands around his shoulders waned and trembled. John looked up into his blue, averted eyes like falling windows. "Yoko isn't here," he finally said, and the words fell into John like a boiling fluid. "She left with Sean. She didn't tell me where they were going, only they were staying away for some time."

"That bitch," John burst out, and tore several paces across the floor in rage. "Who the hell does she think she is? Doing this to me now?" He thought of his wife in polyester, gone to see a prize-cow and fuck Sam Havadtoy while she's at it. This was cruel; this was her in 1974, not calling him back when he was drunk and dismayed without her. This was him struck to the floor, shoulder to shoulder with the Beatles, struck silent by their manager's death as Paul jumped up, a tangle of sky-blue silk and girlish optimism, to suggest they go make a record.

John shook his head and cursed the image away. "No, no, no, she can't do this. Call her, Fred," John said, and wheeling around, his bound hands scrabbled for purchase on his assistant's fragile skin. "Tell her I need her."

"Please, John, try to calm down," Fred pleaded, a human strain of stress piercing his flat, journalistic tone. John forced himself into a quaking pause as he noticed Sam had turned his face away, his eyelids red and squeezed shut.

John swallowed. "Just tell me what's happened," he said with a sudden weakness. "It seems like I got most of my crying done with yesterday, as it is." 

"...Alright," Fred said, and blinked furiously, bloodshot. He tried and failed to meet John's eyes. "What's happened, John, is that she left with Sean. And she told me she's 'sending you away.'"

John blinked slowly. His mind reeled, his gut wrenched. "I'm not in the mood for a trip to Bermuda," he wanted to say. But he knew that wasn't what Yoko meant. "You mean she's left me," he said.

When Fred met his eyes, John knew. "All she said was that she's sent you away," he said. The room fell grayer for each passing second. "And I don't know what she means by it, but she asked me to give you a message." 

A message. Hope stirred faintly in John's clenched heart. "What's that?"

"'Jupiter and Saturn are out of conjunction," said the assistant, his lips pale and cracked. "'Go where you must, but tread carefully and slowly.'" Fred stopped to shudder a breath, and said: "'Survive this alone.'"


	2. Prologue

NBC'S "THE SOURCE"

5:20 AM EASTERN TIME

DECEMBER 9th, 1980

("Boys Don't Cry" fades out.)

TED BROWN: It is 5:20 AM in New York, this is Ted Brown. 

MARIANNE WILLIS: And this is Marianne Willis.

TED BROWN: I have the incredibly sad task to inform you this morning that Beatle Paul McCartney is dead. He has been killed. It has just been confirmed by all the wire services that twenty minutes ago, at 10 AM GMT, he was attacked and fatally wounded outside AIR Recording Studios in London. According to police he'd been on his way to a meeting with George Martin at the studio to discuss plans for an upcoming album, and (faltering) I don't know what else to say at the moment. 

("NBC Hotline Bulletin" jingle plays.)

BETH TAYLOR: This is an NBC News Hotline Report. This is Beth Taylor. Former Beatle Paul McCartney was attacked and killed this morning at 10 AM GMT outside producer George Martin's AIR studios in London. With a special report, David Shores of Radio 1 Newsbeat at the NBC.

DAVID SHORES: Police at the scene of the Hampstead recording studio, which was by producer George Martin of the Beatles, say McCartney was stabbed and fatally wounded by an unknown assailant. According to a witness who'd watched McCartney arrive on the premises, the assaliant had approached him for an autograph, and when the singer obliged he was stabbed several times in the chest. Martin, who told police he'd planned to meet McCartney and members of the band Wings that day to record an album, was close by and called an ambulance. McCartney was transported to the nearest emergency centre, however, when correspondents Michael Hawthorn and Julie Mohin spoke to the doctors who tried to save McCartney, they said he was "dead upon arrival" and that "despite several attempts at resuscitation and transfusions," there was nothing [they] could do."

BETH TAYLOR: This is Beth Taylor. This has been an NBC News Hotline Report. 

("NBC Hotline Bulletin" jingle plays.)

TED BROWN: And this is Ted Brown at the Source. Police say at the moment that they have an assailant in custody, a white male whose identity has not been disclosed. A witness who was on the scene described to new correspondents how the assailant had walked up and down the sidewalk outside the studio for over two hours, as if waiting for McCartney to appear. She, the witness, a resident of the neighborhood who was on her morning walk, had heard McCartney yell McCartney and rushed across the street to see what had happened. The assailant had fled and McCartney had fallen by the studio's doorway, where George Martin and several others, including had emerged to try and help. The group's attempts to help McCartney were unsuccessful, said the witness, and she described how McCartney had been, quote, "trying to tell them something," but couldn't speak through the blood in his mouth. (A pause.) 

MARIANNE WILLIS: The Source will stay on this story throughout the day, and... for now, we won't continue our scheduled punk and new wave show in order to remember Paul McCartney's incredible contributions to pop music and his songs that have touched our hearts for so many years now. 

TED BROWN: Decades.

MARIANNE WILLIS: Yes, for some of us, decades. This is "All My Loving." 

TED BROWN: Paul wrote "All My Loving?" 

MARIANNE WILLIS: Yes, and here it is now.

("All My Loving" begins.)


End file.
